Meeting the Man Who Made Him the (Mistaken) Messiah

Mr. Patel, a San Francisco author and economist, woke up one day earlier this year to discover that he had unwillingly been declared the messiah by followers of the New Age group Share International, founded by Benjamin Creme, a London mystic. It was a revelation that made Mr. Patel the focus of unwanted attention by thousands of worshipers and thrust him into a surreal international news media frenzy.

Last week Mr. Creme visited the Bay Area, and the two men met for the first time, over cookies in a private home in Berkeley, a possible finale in the timely tale of a mortal mistaken for a god.

After the meeting, both men have decided to call the events of the past several months “a case of mistaken identity.” They seemed impressed with each other, with Mr. Creme saying he found Mr. Patel quite intelligent and charming.

Mr. Patel had a different impression of Mr. Creme: “Bonkers.”

In January, devotees of Mr. Creme’s decades-old prophesies concluded — based on a series of clues and unverified information on the Internet — that Mr. Patel was the earthly manifestation of Maitreya, The World Teacher.

Mr. Creme, who said he received telepathic messages from the immortal Maitreya to share with followers, did not endorse the claim. But he did not forcefully deny it either. The story first appeared in this column, then London tabloids devoured the tale mercilessly, and Stephen Colbert, the comedian, devoted an entire segment of his “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central to ridiculing the deification.

Although Mr. Creme has finally released Mr. Patel from his divine burden, it doesn’t mean that he has given up on the idea of a messiah for these troubling times. In fact, his meeting with Mr. Patel was just part of an extended visit to the Bay Area to recruit new believers.

A crowd of more than 600 gathered at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on a recent Sunday afternoon to hear Mr. Creme. Looking his 87 years, he was gently assisted to center stage and then sat stoically as an audio recording played his voice, in a slow Boris Karloff cadence, purportedly channeling the words of Maitreya. “My plan is to show you that the way out of your problems is to listen again to the true voice of god within your hearts, to share,” he said.

When the recording ended, Mr. Creme spoke about the various crises in the world, including the growing imbalance between rich and poor that he ascribed to “an outmoded way of living” — a message that seemed to resonate with the mostly white crowd, some of whom had arrived in Mercedeses and BMWs.

Photo

Raj PatelCredit
Penni Sue Gladstone for The New York Times

Mr. Creme went on to explain that invisible “brothers” from other inhabited planets in our solar system had been on Earth to help mankind escape its problems and usher in a new age.

J. Gordon Melton, a religious scholar who has studied Share International and Mr. Creme since the 1970s, described the group as “small and harmless.”

The group’s messianic message — that a compassionate savior will come and teach the world better ways — “in hard economic times and war has an appeal,” Mr. Melton said. But, he added, non-Christian messiahs tend to face fierce opposition in the United States.

During his Bay Area visit, Mr. Creme was asked about the news of the day, a federal court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in California. Was this a sign of the compassionate new age?

Mr. Creme explained that while he personally supported same-sex nuptials, Maitreya did not approve of gay and lesbian couples’ raising children — the new age promoted by Share International should not include same-sex parents.

In addition to the private meeting in Berkeley, Mr. Patel attended the Sunday lecture for three hours, and concluded that Mr. Creme was “a sweet, pleasant old man” who ultimately “was like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who said she could believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”

But Mr. Patel was inspired in one sense. As the author of best-selling books about big ideas — the first two were about food and economics — he is now considering writing about the whole notion of saviors.

He will certainly have a unique perspective.

Scott James is an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in San Francisco.sjames@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 2010, on Page A17A of the National edition with the headline: Meeting the Man Who Made Him the (Mistaken) Messiah. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe